Nancy Thorner is a writer, cellist, and Tea Party activist based in suburban Chicago who writes regularly for Western Free Press, Illinois Review, and The Heartland Institute's Freedom Pub blog. Nancy is active in the following organizations: The Heartland Institute, Phyllis Schlafly Eagles, Illinois Family Institute, Family-Pac, Republican Assembly of Lake County, and the Women's Republican Club of Lake Forest/Lake Bluff.

The Tenth International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-10) was hosted by The Heartland Institute, Joe Bast, President, on June 11 – 12 at the Washington Court Hotel in Washington, DC. The two-day conference featured more than 40 scientists, economists and public policy experts who shared the most up-to-date information on topics related to climate. Several of the outstanding conference speakers included U.S. Senator James Inhofe, Mark Steyn, Lord Christopher Monckton, and John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel.

Nearly 400 registered for the conference — so many that registration had to be closed about a week before the start on June 11. Likewise, a record number of individuals — more than 10,000 — throughout the world were able to view live stream the on-site conference events.

Given the new science and economics of climate change acquired since the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change held in July of last year in Las Vegas, this year’s ICCC-10 was appropriately titled, “Fresh Start!”

Questions addressed by the speakers and the experts on the fourteen panels presentations included the following:

Should policies adopted at the height of the global warming scare be repealed and replaced with pro-environment, pro-energy and pro-jobs policies?

Senator Inhofe displays political leadership on Climate Change

The conference began with much enthusiasm and energy, which continued until the conclusion of the two-day conference late in the afternoon on Friday, June 12. The kickoff event, a BREAKFAST KEYNOTE AND AWARD PRESENTATION, with a 7:30 a.m. start time on Thursday, June 11, attracted a full house.

After opening and welcoming remarks by James Lakely, Heartland’s Communications Director, and Jim Taylor, Senior Fellow Environmental and Energy Policy at Heartland, Jim DeMint, president of the Heritage Foundation, introduced Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) as Keynote Speaker, where upon DeMint presented Inhofe with the “2015 Political Leadership on Climate Change Award”. Inhofe is Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

During his tenure in Congress, Senator Inhofe has forged a distinguished legislative record on a diverse range of issues. Inhofe may be best known for his work to stop Congress from imposing an economy-wrecking climate tax on the American people. As a lifelong Oklahoman, Sen. Inhofe grew up in Tulsa and graduated from the University of Tulsa with a degree in economics. Inhofe previously spoke at the ICCC-3 conference in Washington, D.C. in 2009.

Senator Inhofe’s book, “The Global Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens your Future”, published February 7, 2012, provided the impetus for Inhof’s Keynote Breakfast address. “The Greatest Hoax” lays out a complete critique of each scientific point in the global warming debate, analyzing its politics as well as its science. Inhofe believes that global warming science is driven by the desire of its advocates to use an international global warming regime (such as that envisioned by the Kyoto Protocol) to restrict worldwide CO2 emissions, thereby overriding U.S. sovereignty on this issue. Inhofe further believes that the IPCC — the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change embraced world-wide as the consensus report on global warming — is politically motivated and control-based.

For evidence of control as the ultimate goal, Senator Inhofe cited a climate-change critic Richard Lindzen, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist who is at odds with most of his colleagues on the prospects of warming, including experts at NASA. According to Lindzen, bureaucrats wants to control carbon dioxide because “if you regulate carbon, you regulate life — you control life and this is what bureaucrats do.” Inhofe debunks the idea that carbon dioxide is pollution. “If it’s pollution, people are polluting the air by breathing.”

Top down control as a means to manipulate while squandering tax payer monies

In regard to the Obama administration, top-down control is being sought through imposing stringent carbon dioxide regulations as a way to manipulate the American people, not to protect them. It’s not at all surprising that talking points given to “alarmists” are then conveyed as truth by a mainstream media in sync with the Left. Al Gore has certainly benefited by becoming the first environmentalist millionaire beginning with his 2007 Oscar-winning documentary on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth”, to which Mr. Justice Gurton, High Court, London, 2007, ruled when an attempt was made to show the film to British students: “The Armageddon scenario that he [Gore] depicts is not based on any scientific view.”

Not to be overlooked is the wasteful use of tax payer monies to promote green energy causes under the guise curtailing global warming. Craig D. Idso, Ph.D reported in Panel 9 that 18 federal agencies engaged in global warming activities in 2013, costing $22.2 billion that year, which was nearly twice as much as was spent on customs and border enforcement. Furthermore, The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says the DOE’s oft-touted $28 billion loan program will cost taxpayers $2.21 billion over the lifetime of the loans. The costs to taxpayers for just green loans has risen about $500 million as the result of loan guarantee defaults (i.e. Solyndra, Abound, and Fisker). Dr. Idso is founder and former president of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, currently serving as chairman of its board of directors.

Jay Lehr, a Panel 7 expert and senior fellow and science director of The Heartland Institute, related how the Navy has declared war on diesel fuel by burning blends of 50 percent biofuels and 50 percent conventional fuels when conducting a military exercise with the Chinese Navy off Hawaii in 2012. The cost to the Navy was nearly $27 per gallon for 450,000 gallons of biofuels produced from algae, waste grease and animal fat, versus around $3.50 for standard petroleum fuels. Lehr also spoke of an incident where 20,000 gallons of renewable diesel fuel was purchased for $424 a gallon when the usual price for jet fuel is between $57 and $67. The Navy is being persuaded to make half of its fuel “green” by 2020. These higher-cost biofuels could add $1.9 billion annually to the Navy’s fuel bill, according to a Defense Department study, enough to pay for a new DDG-51 destroyer at a time when the Defense Departmentbudget faces $13 billion in cuts for Navy shipbuilding over the next four years.

Despite the amount of money being spent by the government and otherwise to convince the American people that Global Warming must be dealt now to avoid future catastrophic consequences, the ruse isn’t working. Senator Inhofe referred to a Gallop poll showing how the level of concern among the American people “About National Problems” in 2015 — ranked in order from a list of fifteen concerns — were 1) the availability and affordability of healthcare and 2) the economy, while the bottom two concerns were 1) race relations and 2) climate change. When similarly polled “About Environmental Problems”, 55% of the American people selected the pollution of drinking water as their top concern. Global warming or climate change ranked dead last at 34%.

As to where the money is coming from to try to resurrect interest in Global Warmng, Inhofe mentioned Tom Steyer, a Democrat billionaire environmentalist who has spent more than $100 million since 2012 of his vast hedge-fund fortune to transform climate change into a top-tier political issue. Though Steuer had mixed results in 2014, concern over climate change has become less important to the American people than it was in 2014. Chris Lehane, Steyer’s top strategist, has declined to say how much Steyer is willing to spend this time around, but he told reporters in April of this year that the billionaire would spend “what it takes.”

Continuing, Inhofe spoke about a Republican North Carolina businessman and entrepreneur Jay Faison, who announced on June 8 that he is putting a whopping $175 million behind a campaign to be run through his ClearPath Foundation. The aim is to get the Republican Party to shift its skeptical view of climate change and green energy, topics that usually fall to the bottom of its list of priorities for Republican voters while generating outright opposition among conservative voters. Read more here.

Inhofe refutes 12 Claims Made by Climate Alarmists

As Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Work, Inhofe’s office compiled the handout shared below that was distributed to conference attendees:

“Refuting 12 Claims Made By Climate Alarmists”

ALARMIST CLAIM #1: ANTARCTIC PENINSULA IS SHRINKING.

FACT: 2008 peer-reviewed paper in American Geophysical Union found “a doubling in snow accumulation in the western Antarctic Peninsula since 1850.

ALARMIST CLAIM #2: GLACIERS ARE MELTING THROUGHOUT THE WORLD.

FACT: A UN Report in 2010 reported that “glaciers, despite climate change, are increasing in many areas of the world.”

ALARMIST #3: THE IPCC STATED THE HIMALAYAN GLACIERS WOULD MELT BY 2035.

FACT: The IPCC got that unsubstantiated and false statistic from a World Wildlife Federation brochure. In January 2010, Time magazine article, Himalayan Melting, How a Climate Panel Got it Wrong: “Glaciergate” is a “black eye for the IPCC and the climate-science community as a whole.”

ALARMIST #4: POLAR BEARS ARE DISAPPEARING.

FACT: Director of Wildlife Research with the Arctic Government of Nunavut: “Of 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.”

FACT: In the 50’s and 60’s there were between 5,000 and 10,000 polar bears. Today there are between 15,000 and 25,000.

ALARMIST #5: MAY 2013, PRESIDENT OBAMA CLAIMED “THE CLIMATE IS WARMING FASTER THAN ANYBODY ANTICIPATED FIVE OR 10 YEARS AGO.”

FACT: Nature reported “For the period (1998-2012) the observed trend of temperatures is. . . not significantly different from zero and suggests a temporary hiatus in global warming.

FACT: The Economist reported “over the past 15 years, air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat. . .”

ALARMISTS CLAIM #6: 2014 WAS THE WARMEST YEAR IN MODERN RECORD BY 0.02 DEGREE.

FACT: Only a “38% chance 2014 was the warmest year on record.” Margin of error, which on average is 0.1 degree Celsius, made “impossible to conclude 2014 was the warmest year” according to the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project stated.

ALARMIST CLAIM #7: IN 2000, DEMOCRATS STARTED SAYING THAT THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED.

FACT: I started getting phone calls from scientists disagreeing so I made a speech on the floor showing how many scientists disagreed.

FACT: WSJ found the 97% consensus to be predicted on “a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research.”

Article 2 will show how the Pope’s encyclical calling for changes in styles of life, of production. and consumption, to combat what he believes is manmade global warming, might not only be premature, but also greatly misguided and damaging to mankind, when scientists are predicting that cooler weather is more in line with what the future holds.